A New Perspective (Philadelphia)

Philadelphia is a beautiful city, if you know where to look.  For this shoot I was able to gain access to the top floor of an apartment building off of Locust Street in downtown Philadelphia.  Along with 4 four other friends, I wasted no time in capturing this moment.  We set up our equipment and continued shooting until we got exactly what we wanted.

This is my favorite shot of the city that I took over the weekend.  This picture is actually an HDR photo (3 different exposures merged together).  However, I made sure to keep the realistic aspect intact to achieve a specific look.  The sun was giving a harsh exposure on the right side of all the buildings, so in order to see the detail throughout the image, i decided to merge the 3 different exposures to achieve an image that the natural I would really see.

As the sun began to set, we took to the streets to capture the real beauty of Philadelphia, the lights.  In this photo I used a long exposure to capture the light trails that you see.  The photo was taken on Broad Street while car were passing by.  My shutter speed was set at 10 seconds with an aperture of about f/22.  In the future I will experiment with different aperture sizes and more light.

This is my rendition of an HDR shot of City Hall.  It's a little more surreal than what I originally planned, but it was fun to experiment with.  Problems I ran into with this photo include the grainy texture in the blacks due to the high ISO on the camera, difficulties with focus since I had to keep my aperture completely open to bring in enough light, and compensating for exposure and gamma amount in Photoshop.  Overall, I like the way this came out, but I hope to work on my HDR skills in the future.